Genomic selection has been successfully implemented in both animal and agricultural crop breeding programmes. Recently, forest tree breeding has also implemented genomic tools to improve the efficiency of breeding and selection procedures. Due to high genetic complexity of most economically important traits, genomic selection shows promise in operational breeding programmes for forest trees. Our two case studies, performed in economically important conifer species, showed that a genomic-based approach can reach similar prediction accuracies compared to the pedigree-based alternative. However, larger training population sample sizes should be used to increase the efficiency of genomic selection and outperform the traditional pedigree-based scenario. Moreover, broad genetic diversity is needed to successfully estimate genetic correlations and perform multivariate analyses.